Phonics/Reading?

[twoxcell]

My dd is 4 will be 5 October 31st. She is super smart, and loves doing school. We are using Beyond Little Hearts for His Glory, and she is loving it. Dd is pretty much doing everything from that along with my ds except the copywork. She is doing SM 1a and 1b, and so far that is going well. Where I'm hitting a wall is phonics. This girl has known all her basic 26 phonigrams since before age 3, and has been interested in learning to read for awhile. She can blend cvc words quite easily, and can tell you what letter words start with. I did the ETC primers with her last year, and started ETC book one with her recently. She hates it and would fight me everytime I brought it out. I think it is because of the writing. Last week I told her we could put it away until she is 5 if she wants, which she was quite happy about. I also have Phonics Pathways, and she hates reading out of it. I have been just writing words on a dry erase board, or spelling them with magnents. I was wondering if anyone had some ideas of more fun hands on ways to practice reading. I really do not want to push her, but she is quite capable of learning. We have all the leapfrog DVD's and she plays Starfall some.

[Chris in VA]

It sounds like she's doing great!

We supplemented Phonics Pathways with Bob Books and some other little readers, and we did some Montessori stuff, and I wrote dd some little books.

Check out Montessori Object Boxes, The Montessori Command Game, and think about writing your own 4 or 5 sentence stories using CVC words and the names of the people in your family (we do just a very, very few sight words like THE and our names at the beginning of reading instruction).

[siloam]

I love the I See Sam books. They are very repetitive in the words they use, building fluency, but also slowly introducing new words. You can buy them here, or use the free but bad copies here. As part of a government project it is my understanding that the original content is not under copyright, so the free versions are perfectly legal.

 

Heather

[sbgrace]

Make it enjoyable! She so young. Making reading dreaded is far worse than just dropping it.

 

I See Sam is absolutely terrific for things like this. The books are gentle and really fun to read. You'll both laugh at the stories.

[Aoife]

DS started with his phonograms at around 2 after watching the talking letters factory. after that we did some HOP playfully and he LOVED the CD-Rom games that went with the letters and sounds. We also did LOTW and some other crafty letter games and activities. I really tried to stretch out the letter part as long as I could since he was so young but still begging to learn. Another thing we did was to get tons of cheap workbooks from the dollar store for letters and he loved just coloring in them and matching letters to words that started with them. At around 3 we started OPGTR and he loved it at first but although a fabulous book it is very very boring and dry. He totally shut down and refused to do the book anymore so we switched things up. We are now using a combo of sing spell read and write, HOP readers, Mcguffey and 100 ez lessons. This combo is working fabulous for us and providing a very solid foundation! The reason I chose to use all 3 together is I can take things more slowly without it being evident and it lets DS see it from 3 different solid angles. He LOVES the songs and games in SSRW, 100 ez lessons us much more inviting for a child so he actually looks forward to it and Mcguffey just adds that little extra of solid foundation and he enjoys them so why not eh.

 

I have seen and am dealing with the fallout of lacking phonics instruction with my DSDs who are PS taught and having a horrible time with reading and spelling. I am in the midst of remediating them both and getting them back on track now.